The Paranoid Style of the Illiberal Campus

In 1964 historian Richard Hofstadter wrote an essay for Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” His thesis was a simple one – that American politics was “an arena for angry minds,” and that this anger often fomented “a sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” among small but vocal groups of the electorate. Hofstadter famously adhered to deeply progressive political beliefs, and the immediate target of his essay was a flurry of conspiratorial movements operating in his own day – McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, and even elements of the Goldwater campaign.

Despite these examples, Hofstadter conceded that this “style of mind” involved a character that was “far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing.” It had antecedents throughout American political history on the Right and Left, and its patterns reflected a certain type of paranoid approach to political analysis rather than any one ideological perspective. Hofstadter’s paranoiac had distinct traits, summarized in the following excerpt:

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.

…

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction.”

We live in a similarly paranoid time, owing no small part to the political insanities of the day – be it the 2016 election, the current president’s twitter feed, or the explosion of illiberal and anti-speech protests on campus.

I did not vote in the last election for reasons I have explained elsewhere and I have little interest in the White House save for deriving occasional entertainment from the absurdities of its self-marginalization. The anti-speech movement on campus is another matter though. It affects the scholarly environment of my own chosen career path, including my ability to research and investigate controversial subject matters that run counter to conventional political wisdom on inequality, on higher education, and a host of other topics.

When encountering the ravings of these illiberal activists, it is useful to recall Hofstadter’s diagnosis. Modern paranoiacs are abundant in academia.

7 comments

Oh my God, the Koch Supervillains donated to a university! No rich person has ever donated to a university before, especially for ideological reasons!

Somehow only leftists are allowed to donate to universities. Only leftists are allowed to give money to causes they believe in or programs they want to support. If a right-winger (and not a very right-wing right-winger at that, since they’re hardly neo-cons) dares to donate money, suddenly it’s all “oooh so spoooky”. But you don’t actually care about that, because all you know is that you were told they were EVILLLL and so you march along to your masters’ tune and never think about how stupid you look to anyone on the outside of your cult.

From 2005-2014, George Mason University (GMU) and affiliated centers have taken just under $80 million from Koch foundations.

The George Mason University Foundation received $46,527,725 from Koch foundations since 2005. The bulk of this funding has gone to GMU’s Economics department and GMU’s Law and Economics Center. This $46.5 million investment represents half of the $90 million total that Koch foundations have sent to college departments at over 360 universities since 2005.

Charles Koch continues to finance and govern two political influence groups hosted on GMU’s Arlington, Virginia campus. Since 2005, Charles Koch’s foundation has given the Institute for Humane Studies $23,386,630, and provided $9,847,500 more to the Mercatus Center. Charles Koch is the chairman of the IHS, and has been directing the organization since the 1960s, before it re-located to GMU. Koch is also a director of the Mercatus Center, which he co-founded with Richard Fink.

In addition to financial ties, Koch has personnel involved with the university. Richard Fink, the vice president of Koch Industries, Inc., and the former president of the Charles G. Koch Foundation and the now-defunct Claude R. Lambe Foundation, serves on the board of directors of the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies.

Richard Fink’s connection to George Mason University is strong. Besides teaching at the university from 1980-1986, Fink has also served on a number of boards at the university including the Institute for Humane Studies and the Center for the Study of Public Choice, the Board of Visitors, and the Student Affairs Committee.

Concerns over Koch and academic freedom for professors to teach material free of restrictions and stipulations in Koch-funded university departments have been raised by professors, students and academic freedom experts.

“The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction.”